I write a good deal about companies and the domain names they use in TV ads. I have done this for sometime now and I can honestly say, more and more companies are doing it! Many are going away from using their flagship domain names (mainly the exact match company names) and going with "catchy" Call-To-Action type domain names. Many are using "Generic" aka exact match product domains. An example of this is Kraft® using CreamCheese.com on it’s cream cheese foil packaging. Makes a lot of sense to me to do this!

Well, Cheerios is rolling with a new campaign and at first I shook my head and had to stop and rewind my DVR to see if I missed something. The ad had a theme, "Non-Challenge"…. the idea is that it is hard to lower cholesterol but it’s a "Non-Challenge" if you eat Honey Nut Cheerios.

The UN and Non are not always best use for domains, as the terms are not used that often. KFC went with the Unthink marketing message and fumbled with it’s UnthinkFC.com domain used. The domain turned into UnthinKFC.com and they took the site down shortly after but keep running the Unthink ads. With the Cheerios ad, the voice-over simply said to visit NonChallenge.com although the visual ad displayed non-challenge.com .

This is what made me stop and rewind the ad… I thought I saw the hyphen in the domain in the ad but the voice-over never said anything about a hyphen. A domain with a hyphen is different than a domain without a hyphen.

Cheerios did there homework and own both versions of the domain name, NonChallenge.com and Non-Challenge.com . Why they try to confuse customers with the hyphen version in the TV ad and say visit NonChallenge.com is likely to make the domain name "display" better. Well, capitalizing the keywords also prevents the domain from being hard to read and would erase them displaying a different domain then they are displaying on the screen, which is less confusing.

They did display the domain in lower case letters like this: non-challenge.com

They could of easily displayed the domain like this as well: NonChallenge.com

Either way, it was good for them to own both version domain names, since they said one and printed the other! Both domain names use 301 redirection to the same landing page, to help prevent any lost visitors. Visitors who look in the address bar will notice the domains forward to HoneyNutCheerios.com .

I think they could of picked a better domain to get there message across.. Non is a funny and odd term to me. It can be catchy since the term is not heard in ad after ad, but again.. it just sounds funny!

I own the domain name NowEasier.com which would of been a good domain / campaign to run with an ad like this. "It’s hard to lower your cholesterol but is Now Easier to do it with Honey Nut Cheerios". Visit NowEasier.com to find out why! etc… The term Now Easier is easy to remember, makes sense and doesn’t fumble off your tongue as much as Non IMO.

A lot of things are hard to do and with new products and services, I still hold out strong hope that some marketing company see’s the value in NowEasier.com like I did when I invested in the domain name.

I do own a great deal of Call-To-Action domain names, but sadly do not sell that many of them. Do you have luck selling any? I was thinking of lining up some contacts with marketing companies and dishing off a couple small batches of "pitches" with matching domains that I have for sale. That way, one might ring in there ears at some point when they have a matching product or service they are doing an ad for.

The most positive thing that I see is the continued effort of large companies running ads with Call-To-Action domains over and over again…. which means they are likely to keep on buying, as they clearly work!